NEW DANCE The Happiest Day Of My Life
Edinburgh: Festival Theatre, Fri 12 & Sat 13 Nov.
Love is a simultaneously titanic yet soggin domestic mess, according to the latest show from Britain’s groundbreaking DV8 Physical Theatre. The title is heavily ironic, but artistic director Lloyd Newson's production starts with a surprisingly light touch. Katina Kangaris, an ambiguous, solo Greek chorus, belts out a cod-operatic 'Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing'. Mock-romanticism is in the air.
The first act is a romp, meandering yet shrewdly observed. It charts the puke-up and pick-up rituals amongst some sketchy proletarian clubbers. The party continues at home, cueing a balloon ballet, carefully calibrated horseplay on and around a sofa, and loads of sportive spitting.
Is mayhem showing? DV8
Bob Bailey‘s set, co-devised with the company, is a marvel of cunning recesses, reflective windows and sliding walls. An early masturbatory fantasy - ingeniously staged so that the inarticulate male lead appears to enter the soft-core porn film within his own head — signals darker waters ahead.
Act Two is like a suburban variant of Eyes Wide Shut, depicting newly- wedded bliss scarred by infidelity, voyeurism and latent homosexuality. The amazing set transforms into a pool with a lounge in the middle. The underlying message? No man is an island, but it's all too possible to be stranded on one emotionally.
Neither sour nor sentimental, nor as profound as it means to be, Happiest Day is an intermittently affecting take on the difficulties of intimacy and the illusory nature of desire. Its greatest assets are committed performances and one of the most visually arresting designs you’ll ever see. (Donald Hutera)
CONTEMPORARY DANCE Richard Alston Dance Company
Edinburgh: Festival Theatre, Tue 9 Nov fr}? 7%.
At the Festival Theatre, Richard Alston's fluid trademark vocabulary of high, wide leaps and full-flung spins will receive the breathing space it deserves. This current touring programme of three dances marks the inaugural season for four of the troupe's nine members. On the evidence of a performance seen last month, Alston's current lot are still learning to live together inside his work.
Alston is probably one of the world’s most musically sensitive choreographers. But in Red Run, he and six dancers wade into the morass of Heiner Goebbels’s score in a vaguely progressive rock-jazz mode. There is a close, intriguing male duet marked by roll-overs and prop-ups, and a woman's wrist-shaking solo of some force, but little else to really wrap the mind around.
Alston crafted the exhilarating Roughcut nine years ago, when he was the artistic director of Rambert Dance Company. The revamped version has reach and flow, with dancers looping and bounding, slicing and slinging themselves through the complex patterns laid atop Steve Reich's vibratory music.
Martin Lawrance is a particularly adept exponent of Alston's style. He is the focal point of the new, chamber-
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Barefooted audacity: Richard Alston Dance Company
sized A Sudden Exit. This abstract meditation on aloneness and the pangs of letting go is set to a melancholic piano score by Brahms, played live. It is Alston at his most emotionally restrained, introspective and personal. The piece avoids melodrama, instead slipping quietly into one's subconscious as the still centrepiece of a moody, variable evening. (Donald Hutera)
STAR RATINGS the at: at: Unmissable M * * Very "good Hi all W0 3 shot 9: * Below average it You've been warned
THEATRE
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directed by Grant Smeaton
‘ -' With a musical backdrop ‘4 _ echoing the best days of disco -' and reverberating with live performances of classic torch songs. the alternately moving a and hilarious life and loves of Arnold. a 1970's New York drag .- l' _ queen. are laid before us.
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Glasgay! 99
By arrangement with Samuel French Ltd.
Wed 3 - Sat 6 November 7.65pm $28 I £5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .t: 81236 732887
Thu 11 - Sat13 November 7.38pm £7 / £5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .t: 813552 68669
Thu 18 8. Fri 19 November 7.38pm £8 / £6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .t; 8131 665 2240
Sat 28 November 7.38pm £7 / £3.58 ($6 I £3 if purchased 2 weeks in advance) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..t; 81786 461881
Tue 23 - Sat 27 November 8pm lst night all tickets £3 Wed 8. Thu {695/8358 Fri 8. Sat 88.95/25 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .t; 0161 552 6267
Cumbernauld Theatre
East Kilbride Village Theatre
Brunlon Theatre Musselburgh
MacRobert University of Stirling
Tron Theatre Glasgow
Torch Song Trilogy includes one scene containing strongly worded dialogue which deals with aSpecls of adult sexuality and where we would advise parental guidance for young people under 16.
4—18 Nov 1999 THE LIST 63